Well, all good things come to an end, like the song says, so it does DudesConf. We had a very good time here, all the people was having fun and enjoying Debian and the great hospitality of the GPUL people, which make us feel like at home, like the previous times. Superb organization, I hope we can repeat the experience the next year.

I've also been able to put myself online again, so expect me fighting again ;-)

Long time has passed since last post here. Real life in general and my paid job in particular has kept me too busy to leave room for anything else. Now seems things will be better: new project and new bosses (I'm in Ariba team again), though company is the same, so lets see how much it lasts.

Regarding free software there's not much to say, my online life never was so low and I've even lost some sponsored packages in Debian because my lack of activity. There's several hundreds of unread mails pending and things to be done are still to be done. Nevertheless, I'm now at DudesConf enjoying a nice sunny weekend at A Coruña, the talks of my Debian fellows and trying to put myself up to date. For now, I've been able to fix the German manual of Claws Mail so the hydra is able to build packages again.

While trying to launch claws-mail in my remote ssh-forwarded display I got an:X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication error message.I realized then that while DISPLAY was configured correctly to point localhost:10.0 I was using another user in the screen session, not the one used to ssh in. After some googling for the message seems the usual culprits for this were low disc space (!) and disabled X11 forwarding, which were not my case. There were mentions to ~/.Xauthority permissions, but you don't have such file when you su to another user. So xauth came to my rescue: on the user which logs in you can list authorizations:

This setup, appart of the manual sync, had some issues to be addressed:

Because of packaging activities /var was always nearly full, so it had to be increased

Because of doubling the memory some months ago, there was less swap than current RAM size (2G), also something to fix

The hardware choice wasn't very difficult, as I tend to like Seagate, so balancing price, capacity and availability decided for a couple of ST3500418AS. These are SATA-II, while my motherboard is SATA-I only but aren't they supposed to be backwards compatible? Well, they are, but you have to setup a jumper to lower interface speed, otherwise the disc isn't even recognized by the motherboard.

Buying the discs had some more difficulties. First tried Alternate, but this time they pretend me to pay the SGAE[es] tax for media (which is around 12 euros per disc), despite I clearly explained these were system discs to be mounted in RAID (and the tax is supposed only to apply non-system drives). Phoned them even, but no way, so I finally rejected the discs and went Optize, which doesn't seem to have the supposedly legal problem Alternate has with declaring system discs. They were served on time and for less than 90 euros, so bravo for them :).

After having the bare metal, initially these options for migration were considered:

Buy a 2.5 disc, copy current data (a 250 Gb disc is enough), install the new system, copy back

Buy a hard disc enclosure for the remaining good disc, install the new system, use the enclosure to copy data back

But in the end I got it with a fourth option based on this later one: install a new system with all the RAID setup, disconnect second drive (like if the array had failed), reconnect and copy contents of old drive to new system, restore second RAID drive and add it again to the array, so it gets synced again. Nothing to buy and more fun to see how fast the MD rebuilds the array.

So /dev/sda is dying, now for real. It gave me some warnings two or three weeks ago, so last week I made a complete backup on its twin disk, using ddrescue, because dd wasn't able to do it without failing.

It's time, again, to seek for a couple of disks which last for almost five years... if possible.

Yesterday I got a interesting announce in my inbox: try our hosting solution for free during two months. The announce came from the nice people of Gandi, the registrar where I maintain my mones.org domain.

So far, so good. Applied and got my share in minutes. The features are not impressive, just the minimal: 256 MB RAM, 3 GB (system) + 5 GB (data) disk, 5 Mbit bandwidth and a 1/60th part of the processor, which is marketed as something between a Pentium III and Via C7 processor (not very informative).What took most time was to wait the reverse DNS to be active because of my change of mind in the middle of the process :-). The system installed was Debian Lenny, of course, and took just minutes.

Less than 24 hours later you can see what happens, and I have not access to the server... despite I love the way Gandi does business those are not the things that inspire confidence in a hosting solution :-(.

It's amazing to check and see how much has passed since last post. Not that I had nothing to tell, but maybe not in the mood to do it. Anyway there's not much excitement in my life lately, but looking back seems it isn't going too bad.

The project we were working at is already at production stage, and with only two or three phone calls to solve minor issues so far, which is not common, as I've heard. This is something I, as a the project leader, am proud of, and not being wrong with all the work-hours invested in testing and bugfixing ;-). The client seems to be happy with the results, and a second phase is planned, so more work waiting for our group. This contrasts with the landscape in other parts of the company, and the rumors floating around fed by the bad economic situation. Currently we already started other project for the our regional government, so we can't get bored at work until the end of year or so... Anyway, if luck smiles to me, I'll be doing more interesting things by the next year: yesterday submitted a grant application for review. Grants is a R+D program to provide funds for innovative ideas within the company. My idea is not so new, but it will be fun to investigate how to replace our Windows based SOE (i.e.: the image deployed in our laptops and desktops) by a Linux based one.